Cancer Milk by Seth Luther

I learned on my first day that one of my co-workers, a former VISTA, had written a book. It was described as being like Kurt Vonnegut's work. Since I read almost everything Vonnegut ever wrote, I figured I might like it and asked to borrow.

It was fun and totally lived up to the Vonnegut comparison. Lots of random stuff happening that somehow comes together to form a quasi-coherent story. The devil's son decides to spread cancer to the world and a boy who talks to goats must go to the goat home planet to find the cure to cancer. It was fun and I enjoyed. :)

Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America by Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas

At my work, there is apparently a list somewhere of recommended reading that will help you understand the business. One of my coworkers had this book in their collection and mentioned it was on the list so I asked to borrow it.

The basic premise of the book is that every place has it's ambitious, non-ambitious, and those in between. In small, rural areas, the ambitious leave and those who stay have few and poor opportunities available to them. The book further comments that the small towns have designed the system in such a way that those from "good" families will be the ones that succeed and others will be looked over.

The lack of opportunities struck me a bit because people really don't make much here. Working the grant department, grants often have people's salaries listed in them if the grant is paying part of their salary. So I know what many people make. People with master's degrees are barely getting $30K. $50K puts you at the top of the pack. Admittedly, this is a non-profit, but my roommate has bemoaned the extreme lack of good paying jobs and it seems to be a common issue. Jobs are key to a successful economy and rural areas just don't have too many. That said, I don't know that there really is a "fix" to it as the book suggests. Let's say you got two really highly skilled companies in to a rural area and supported the schools in such a way that they were making enough skilled workers. What happens when one goes out of business or moves? Those skills aren't easily transferred in a rural area. Since employers can disappear at any time, it makes since that highly skilled jobs are concentrated in urban areas where workers have a multitude of places that they can turn to in case something happens to their employer. It also makes sense that rural areas tend to be concentrated with low skilled jobs that most people could potentially do. While it's unfortunate for those people that technology has made their jobs so extremely low skilled that they now pay very little and have fewer job opportunities in total, I feel like this book is largely bemoaning change. It's important to recognize the downsides of technological advancements and a service based economy and that's what I got from this. There are people out there whose lives are worse off because of things we largely see as positive and it would be great to help them. I am not convinced though that most rural towns truly can be revived to thriving economies.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

This is a truly fantastic book. It's written by a Behavioral Economics professor and is all about the irrational idiosyncrasies of human nature. He explains dozens of fascinating experiments he conducted in which people consistently behave in ways that are "unexpected", at least from a rational viewpoint.

I initially heard of Dan Ariely by reading Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which cites some of his work. While Nudge was interesting, I think that this book has the interesting aspects of Nudge in far greater depth and lacks all of the boring parts. While the first chapter or two was largely a repeat of what I read in Nudge, the rest of the book really expanded on the ideas.

One of my favorite chapters was "The Cost of Social Norms: Why We Are Happy to Do Things but Not When We Are Paid to Do Them". In it, he claims that there are essentially two tracts by which we evaluate things- market norms and social norms. We are all social creatures and are happy to do favors. But if you put a price tag on that favor, we stop seeing the situation as social and we most certainly want to be paid what we're worth. Ariely performed an experiment in which he first asked students to perform repetitive, menial tasks for $.10, then for $.50. As typical market theory suggests, the $.50 group was motivated to work harder and performed more tasks. They then asked a group to do the same tasks as a favor, with no mention of a reward and that group worked the hardest and performed the greatest number of tasks. Which just shows the incredible motivational factor of social norms. He then introduced gifts in to the equation for the unpaid group- Snickers bars, Godiva chocolates, and nothing and found that all groups still performed quite highly and very similarly. Then he did the same, but referred to the gifts as a "fifty cent" Snicker bar and a "five dollar" box of chocolates. This language changed their motivation from a social arena to a market arena and their performance was reduced to what it had been at the cash level. I find this absolutely fascinating and totally believable.

I think that this chapter fascinated me so much because of my current work in Americorp. While I do get a menial living stipend, I am essentially a volunteer. I am operating on a social level. Many people who do Americorp end up in the non-profit sector and so the thought has been floating in my mind about whether or not that is something that I want to do in a year when my service is done. And in general I keep leaning towards probably not. This chapter completely explained why. When I think of working in the non-profit sector as a volunteer, it's social and I don't need real payment. If I were to think of it as a career, I don't think I would feel the same way. I would think of the market value of my time and skills and want to be paid accordingly. And I think that would mean not working in the non-profit arena. What can I say? I'm irrational- and predictably so. :)

Each chapter of this book presents equally fascinating and thought-provoking experiments. I could go on and on citing incredibly cool experiments that he performed, but you'd be better off just reading the book. It's pretty great.